


The Test

by Beth Harker (chiana606), chiana606



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, javid - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 00:49:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1878747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiana606/pseuds/Beth%20Harker, https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiana606/pseuds/chiana606
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To anybody else, Jack included, this would be a golden opportunity.  To David it’s a nightmare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Test

It’d been more than a month since Jack had seen David other than in passing. And yeah, Jack tried not to take it personal, but it was tough, when the thing that had David all wrapped up was how he was graduating from school in a couple of weeks, and going on to be some kind of hot shot reporter, while Jack drudged away at building ships. That’s why, when Jack caught sight of David hanging around the docks, he gave the foreman an extra twenty minutes of work, instead of bolting the moment the clock struck seven, like he usually did. 

By this time David was sitting on a crate a little ways away, and Jack couldn’t help but be happy about the way he looked practically ready to jump at him. Jack took his time, making sure he had all his stuff packed up, drinking some water out of the flask in his bag, and using the shirt he’d taken off hours before to wipe some of the sweat and grime off of his neck and chest, before stuffing that back into the old potato sack he carried to and from work each day. 

Jack wasn’t sure at what point in his display of just how much he wasn’t going to hurry that he lost David’s attention, but by the time Jack made his way over to him, David was clutching the sides of his crate and staring out at the flowing water and half-built ships. Jack tried not to be surprised. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand David was busy. He got that.

What he didn’t get was why these days David would snap at him that he didn’t have time before even saying hello. It was a change that’d happened real suddenly. One day it had been all, “I only have five minutes, Jack, so I want to use them well,” and back alley kisses that showed David knew what he was talking about, and then… nothing. The cold shoulder, without so much as a word about what was up. As far as Jack was concerned David deserved to be ignored a little. 

“Look Dave….” Jack started, standing behind where David sat.

“Hi,” David interrupted. It made Jack pause. That word, that simple greeting, just wasn’t what you said to somebody who was gearing up to chew you out, and anybody but Dave would have known that. 

“Yeah. Hi,” Jack rolled his eyes, but David had already made it tough for Jack to keep his voice as hard as he wanted it to be, and he’d done it in less than five seconds. Jack sat down next to him, giving him a little shove to show that he was still pissed. “Like I was sayin’, look Dave, I’m tired and I’ve got my own stuff to do so…” 

David gave Jack a tight nod. “Something happened,” he said, in a voice that made Jack feel like the pit of his stomach had fallen out, and his mind crowd up with images of horrible things. Jack grabbed on to David’s arm, shifting to get a better look at him. He looked well… haggard, like he hadn’t slept in a while, and all clenched up and worried. 

“A good thing!” David announced quickly. False cheer made David’s voice higher than usual, and his eyes seemed big and bright as he looked at Jack and then back out at the river. “It’s great and amazing! Nothing better could have um… befallen well… just about anybody!” 

“What happened?” Jack asked, trying to sound casual, and happy for whatever this “good” thing was, and not quite succeeding. 

David shrugged, then shook his head. He ran his hand through his hair. Jack’s mind went to stampeding elephants. Maybe Les and Sarah had been killed, and David had lost it, and was about to tell him how great it was that his siblings were floating around the sky as angels, playing harps, and watching over them all. Maybe David was really going to try to sell the idea to Jack, and tell him about all the celestial help his dead siblings were going to bring to them from now on, or about how Les had beat the other angels at poker or something.

“Do you wanna talk about it at my place?” Jack asked. Time had stretched on for too long, and if Dave’s family had bit the bucket and he was having hallucinations, Jack guessed that his house was as good a place to take him as any. 

“Can’t.” David stood up and brushed himself off, like that was a very important thing to do. Jack put an arm around his shoulder, pulling him close against his side for a moment. 

“It’s fine. Let’s at least get somewheres other than here, alright?” Jack said, trying to both reassure David, and get him anywhere other than out in the middle of the city, because his smile looked ready to crack at any moment. 

“Nobody died,” David said quickly. Jack barked out a laugh, without quite knowing why. Maybe it was relief, or just the fact that David could read his mind like that.

“Didn’t think anybody had.” 

Any levity Jack might have felt disappeared with David’s tight nod. Maybe the Jacobs household was fine, but something was still going on that Jack needed to know about.

“Come on.” Jack pulled David along. He gave David’s shoulder a quick squeeze, and felt the tight muscle there go slack and slumped underneath his hand. “Let’s get you somewhere where we can talk, huh?” 

For a second Jack thought David was going to come along with him. He could tell that David wanted to at least, but the instant Jack felt David’s body tense up again, Jack knew that he had lost. 

“I can’t come,” David said more firmly. He planted his feet on the ground, unwilling to budge, and Jack bit back a sigh. 

“Fine. Suit yourself. So, you going to tell me the good news or not?” 

David nodded, and didn’t say anything, leaving Jack torn between worry and impatience. 

“Look,” Jack continued, “You’re the one who’s been too busy to talk these last weeks, so why don’t you spit it out and stop wasting time?” 

“I have to take a math test.”

“And?” Jack shrugged, bemused, and David stood a little straighter, a little more deliberately. He cleared his throat.

“I have the opportunity to take a math test,” David amended. He looked Jack straight in the eye as he said it, but there was still something wrong about his smile. Jack tried to remind himself that he was worried about David, because he felt more than a little inclined to shake him until he told him what the hell was up in a straight forward way, so Jack could at least make up his mind about whether he was angry with David, or if David needed somebody to look out for him, or what. 

“You’ve had the opportunity to take lots of tests these days,” Jack answered at last. 

“This one is different.”

“Alright?” 

David let out a breath, “It’s… well, it’s kind of like a competition. About three hundred kids around New York are going to take it. The top five of us get sent to college. In Boston. For free. Well, the test isn’t free… It’s really expensive, fifteen dollars, but the college is free.” 

David spoke quickly, and it took Jack a minute to process it. Boston. College. He put his hands in his pockets, taking a step back from David.

“So you’re getting out of New York?” Jack asked. 

David nodded. “The teacher who signed me up for it got into a fight… or maybe not a fight, but at least an argument… Anyway, she got into an argument with some of the other teachers over it. They… they thought another student would be more suited. Any other student, somebody who doesn’t cause trouble, and…” 

Jack snorted. None of it was funny, not really, but he was just about desperate to find something to laugh at. It didn’t occur to him that laughing might be a bad idea until he saw the suddenly firm set of David’s jaw, and the way he folded his arms like he was closing himself off. David’s mouth clamped shut, stopping the flow of words that would’ve come out. 

“My father’s paid for the test,” David said, his voice clipped and deliberate now. “I’m going to be in the top five.” 

Jack nodded. He could believe that. Probably he’d be the first one. David didn’t like math, but he was also David. He was good at it the same way he was good at just about everything his school threw at him, aside from knowing when to shut up. 

“So… then you’ll win this test, and go to Boston to learn even more about numbers, huh?” Jack said, proud of how conversational it sounded. David just nodded. Jack wanted to pull him in closer and get a good look at his face, but he couldn’t. Something still didn’t seem right, but maybe it was just the idea of losing David that made Jack feel that way. It was sort of funny. Jack had stayed in New York several years later than he’d meant to because of David, and now David was the one who was going to up and leave. 

“That’s great,” Jack heard himself say. “You’re great. You’ll do great in Boston.” 

Another nod from David. Jack gritted his teeth. He’d be happy for David’s chance, he decided, because that was what he had to be, and because it wasn’t like he hadn’t always known that Dave was going places. He wished he’d say something though, instead of going silent on him like some kind of idiot. 

“Guess I can head off to Santa Fe then, once I get you out of my hair,” Jack said, to fill the silence, and because he was grasping for something good to look forward to once David was gone.

“I should go home and study,” David answered.

“You go do that,” Jack said. David nodded again, but instead of heading off straight away he stood watching Jack, like he was waiting for something, not that Jack had any idea what he wanted. Wasn’t like Jack could help him on the test. That’s why, when Jack wished him ‘good luck’ it didn’t sound that different from ‘get out of here’. 

David took the hint. No sooner had the words left Jack’s mouth than he had turned, heading down the road that Jack knew led to home. 

 

 

It was more than two weeks before Jack saw David again, but he thought about him plenty. He hadn’t been as careful lately about putting money away to get out of New York. It wasn’t that he never thought about it, but stuff with David had sort of snowballed in the past couple of years since the strike, and somehow Jack had let him become the most important thing in his life, even knowing that David would be moving up, while Jack had no real hope of following. 

The future had been looking really good though, up until that math test. David had been doing some work at the Sun on the weekends, not selling papers, but copy editing stories, and he’d even written one of his own and gotten it published. Denton had it all laid out for him, including a job once he finished up with school. David had been more happy and excited about this than Jack had ever seen him get over just about anything. And as for Jack… well, he’d gotten his own place, and the ship-building thing wasn’t the worst job he’d ever had. It made Jack happy sometimes, building those ships, because even as he got more and more rooted in New York, it was good to think that he was building something that would take people far and wide and all the way across the ocean. Sailors were poor folk like Jack, for the most part, and Jack liked to think about them going places. 

David didn’t want to go places, and never had. It was one of his biggest flaws, far as Jack was concerned. David was the kind of kid who could read books about ancient Greece until the cows came home, without ever even taking a second to imagine what it would be like to wear a toga and eat olives and pomegranates all day. David had never even seen a pomegranate, and Jack hadn’t either. There was a whole world out there, with cactuses, coyotes, buffalo herds, and pomegranates, and the most Jack could get David to do about it was look those things up in an encyclopedia.

Probably David was half sick with worry about going to Boston. Jack wondered what there was to see in Boston. Maybe he could follow Dave there, if it wouldn’t hold him back too much. Life was stupid a lot of the time. David was the one who wouldn’t go anywhere, and Jack was the one who was worried about holding him back. 

On the Thursday of the second week of David’s study induced exile, Jack met up with Mush and Blink. Turned out David had been out to Tibby’s with them, and wasn’t really avoiding everyone at all, just Jack. 

“He didn’t look great,” Mush explained with a frown. “Said his Ma told him he had to get out of the house for the evening, even though he had four more books to read. Showed me one of ‘em. It’s weird. Davey says he’s studying math, but those books is mostly letters.” 

“That’s ‘cause advanced math uses letters,” Blink explained, like he and Mush had been having this conversation a lot. “Think about it like this. We all knows that one and one is two, but not one of us can say what A and A is.” 

“It’s aa,” said Jack. He didn’t have much patience for talk about David, but he did know basic spelling, and the sound that letters made.

“Like aaaaaaaa a ghost?” Asked Blink, looking unconvinced. 

“Same as J plus A plus C plus K spells out my name. That ain’t math though, and it ain’t what Dave’s thinking about.”

“He’s thinking about his family,” Mush said. “And the cash his Pa dropped on that test. You know, I’m not sure he even wants to go to Boston.” 

“Who wouldn’t want to go to Boston?” Blink made a grand sweeping gesture like he knew all about Boston, and thought it was just about the best place on the planet. “It’s practically Santa Fe, hey Jack?” 

That earned Blink a shove.

“It’s practically New York, from what the papes say,” Jack told him. “A big sprawling industrial mess, like all them other big cities.” 

“Yeah,” said Mush. “But it ain’t New York, and Dave’ll be there soon enough.”

 

It was early evening when David finally decided it might be worth talking to Jack, who was hanging around his apartment, trying and failing to read a stained brochure on discount real estate out west, that somebody (probably somebody with no dreams or aspirations) had tossed in the gutter. The first knock on Jack’s door was quiet, and the next one a loud bang, like the intruder had had second thoughts about coming softly and was ready to force his way instead. 

Jack jumped out of his bed, and grabbed the knife that he kept on his bedside table. It wasn’t a pretty way to greet guests, but it was one of the facts of living where he did. A guy could never be too careful. 

David looked gratifyingly surprised to come face to face with Jack’s blade, even though he knew full well that Jack kept a knife in the house, and was in the habit of answering the door with it. 

“Can I come in?” He asked, after regarding Jack and the knife for a moment. Jack hadn’t washed in the last two days, and he guessed he looked like a greasy mess, just the kind of goon who would live in a ratty apartment with a moldy bed and wield a butcher’s knife. He lowered it slowly, but didn’t put it down. 

“What do you want?” Jack asked. 

“To come in.” 

Jack rolled his eyes, but stepped aside so that David could get into the room. “Figured as much,” he said with a small huff. “Come to say bye before you head off to college?” 

David shook his head. He hadn’t closed the door behind him, so Jack did that, and bolted it shut. David wasn’t even supposed to be coming to Jack’s place on his own, not that that had ever stopped him before. Jack often felt like David only ever took precautions on this street as a way of humoring him. 

“What do you want then?” Jack asked. He leaned against the door frame, almost leaning over David. 

“You could put the knife down for starters.” 

Jack didn’t put the knife down. He sort of shrugged, and stopped to examine it instead. It was old and rusty, with probably about a dozen owners before Jack had even set eyes on it, but strong and sharp. 

“I like it,” Jack said, just for the satisfaction of disagreeing with David, who had after all practically spent all of the last week palling around with Blink and Mush, and not saying a word to him. “It’s got all kinds of uses.” 

David looked doubtful, so Jack used the tip of the knife to pick some of the dirt out from under his fingernail, careful not to cut himself in the process. 

David trying to snatch away the knife was the last thing that Jack expected, but that’s just what he did, causing Jack to drop it on the floor with a loud clang as he made a grab for David’s wrist to keep him from hurting himself. 

“You trying to get cut?” Jack asked, anger and annoyance seeping into his voice. He gave David’s wrist a shake before pushing it back. 

David didn’t answer, which was a typical thing for him to do, once he’d gotten his way in something. He bent down to pick up the knife, and returned it to Jack’s bedside table. 

“You need to calm down,” Jack said behind him. 

“Oh, I need to calm down? I’m not the one who answers the door with weaponry.” 

“Ain’t a guy round here that don’t. It’s the only safe thing to do. What about your test?” 

“Failed it,” David said in this painfully light voice.

“So that’s why you decided to come by?” Jack asked, turning his attention to his fingernails again. He felt angry and mean, and he wanted, just really desperately wanted to lash out at David a little bit, but he couldn’t do it while looking at his face. “Did figuring out you ain’t cut out for some fancy school make you decide it was worth hanging around with the likes of me again? You know, since you don’t got nothing better to do?” 

The words tasted rotten in Jack’s mouth. He hated them. He’d wanted them to make him feel better about how things had been going lately, but they did the absolute opposite. He let his hands fall to the side. There was too much dirt under his nails to ever clean it out anyway, and that’s just how life was always going to be for him, so long as he hung around in New York. 

“You know that’s not how things are,” David said, sounding at his wit’s end.

“Fine. Then tell me how things are, Dave.” 

Jack forced himself to look at David this time, to really examine him as much as his dank apartment with its one window and the waning light outside would allow. The shadows in the room made David look haggard and small, even worse than the last time Jack had seen him. 

“I had to study,” David said, not like he was trying to argue, still uncomfortably casual. 

“I know what you’re like when you study,” Jack said, and he did. He knew that when David studied he was more likely to see him a couple of times a week than every day, and he knew that those couple of times were always over just about as soon as they begun, but he’d never before gotten the a sense of total avoidance from David like he had lately, like David was ready to cut him off completely. Jack guessed he’d been with David long enough to feel assured that cutting him off was the last thing David wanted to do, but ever since Boston and the test, things had seemed a lot less certain. 

“I didn’t want to go to Boston,” David said, quieter now. 

“Yeah, I figured, but…” 

“I didn’t want to go to Boston, and I don’t want to go to Boston. I have absolutely no desire to leave New York and go to Boston. Everything and every person I care about is here. Going to Boston is literally the last thing in the world I want to do, ever.” 

David didn’t sound casual anymore. He sounded just about as upset as Jack had ever heard him.

“So you failed the test on purpose,” Jack asked, trying to understand. 

“No!” 

“Fine! So what’d you do, huh? Hit your head before the test and forget all that math you was jamming it full of? Have no time to study because Mush was keeping you busy?”

“Mush?” David asked, his confusion equal to Jack’s frustration. 

“Just hurry up and tell me why you failed the test. That’s what you came here for, ain’t it, so spit it out.”

“I froze. I thought I was going to be sick, and I couldn’t even make myself write my name,” David said finally.

Jack went still, and just watched David. 

“Should I go?” David asked. He sounded upset, in a way that Jack couldn’t ignore. He tried to hang on to his anger with David, because maybe David deserved it, and maybe there were some things that they needed to get out in the open. 

Jack waited. 

David reached up to rub his temples, hands pressing hard against the skin, and Jack couldn’t tell if it was because he had a headache, or because he was trying to keep himself together. At last Jack took a step closer to David, putting a cautious hand on his shoulder, because David was there, and David was important, and Jack couldn’t just not touch him. 

“Your folks going to be mad?” Jack asked. He couldn’t imagine David freezing on a test, but he decided not to say anything about that now. 

“Disappointed,” David muttered. 

“You alright?” 

David just shrugged. “I’m tired,” he said. 

Jack sighed. “Sit,” he half ordered, putting an arm around David’s shoulder and leading him over to the bed. It was strange, seeing David looking so worried, or to think something small like a test had defeated him.

“I used to freeze on tests sometimes… most of the time when I first started school,” David said, taking his place on the bed like he’d been told. “When I was about six I guess, just the first couple of times I ever had to take a test, but it hadn’t happened in years.”

Jack had never seen David freeze up under any circumstances, not ever. He reached up to rub David’s back, hands moving over the tense muscles there. His mind went to this one time, a few months back, when they’d ended getting chased by the bulls after a bar brawl. David, who up until then had been the worst liar Jack knew, had spent over an hour talking the police officer into believing that Jack was in fact his wayward brother, that the fight had been caused by someone other than them, and that their parents would be having a stern conversation with their superior officer if Jack was unfairly arrested. Even Jack hadn’t dared to try and say anything against David to save his skin, for fear of getting him in trouble in the process. 

David was somebody who passed every test, kept up with the increasingly sordid lives of his friends, and managed to consistently show up unarmed at Jack’s place at any time he chose, without ever getting hurt. Things here just weren’t adding up right. David was slumping under Jack’s touch as if he really was exhausted. 

“It’ll be fine, right?” Jack said. He still felt far away, like he was watching himself and David from above, witnessing from some distant place the way his hands stained the crisp white of David’s shirt. David didn’t answer him. 

“Your folks will be glad that you’re sticking around,” Jack said. “They wanted you to go for the chance, not ‘cause they wanted you gone.” 

“Are you glad I’m sticking around?” David asked. 

It should have been an easy question to answer, but Jack couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. He wrapped his arms around David’s waist, resting his head on his shoulder for a second. 

“That’s not an answer,” David pointed out. 

“Yeah it is.” 

David turned around to face Jack, “You’re not the only reason I couldn’t do the test. You’re just a part of it. Everything here was finally going exactly the way I wanted it to. I had you, and the job at the paper, and I was finally about to get away from that school. It wouldn’t have been bad. I had prospects of making money for my family instead of having them spend money to get me settled in Boston, and even for the train tickets there, and it’s not as though I would have been able to afford to come back and visit, once I got there. And I don’t even know what I would have done after I finished college. I’d know a lot about math, and nothing about any of the skills I want to develop. If you don’t use a skill you know, it stagnates, and you forget it. Like Latin. I’m sure I forgot an entire four years worth of Latin while I was studying for that stupid math test.”

“Didn’t think you was planning on using Latin for much.”

“That isn’t the point. Latin is the root language of a lot of other more important languages like French, Italian, and Spanish, but that’s not the point. I’d go through college for four years, and come out only knowing about math, and then I’d have to be a banker, and nobody would ever trust a Jewish banker, because we’re selfish and money grubbing, and that’s considered common knowledge.”

“Anybody says that and I’ll knock their teeth out,” Jack said automatically. The truth was that he was having trouble following David’s train of thought here. All he knew was that it was hurtling forward fast enough to break a guy’s neck, and there wasn’t any stopping it now. That’s how things went with David sometimes. 

“But I still should have done well on the test, and then gone,” David said, frustrated. Jack hooked his head over his shoulder to look at him.

“Seems you just gave me lots of reasons why you wanna stay.”

David shook his head. Jack waited, arms still tight around him. 

“It was a chance. A really big one. It isn’t a chance that I’m going to get again. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I don’t know anybody who does what they want to do. My father doesn’t, and Sarah most certainly doesn’t. Getting sent away to Boston would have only been fair. You know, the test was in Brooklyn, and a teacher from one of the other schools was chaperoning us on the walk across the bridge, to make sure we didn’t get lost or get hurt, or…”

“You could walk that bridge in your sleep.” 

“Or get into trouble, and so I was walking with all of these boys who I had never met before, and we’re all there to compete against each other, so they were trying to talk pleasantly about the weather while working in questions about equations to size the other boys up, because we were all essentially each other’s enemies, but then five of us would get chosen in the end, and need to quickly form an alliance of sorts, so we’d know somebody from home once we got to Boston. Then one of Spot’s newsies recognized me on the bridge, so he had to stop me and interrogate me about what I was doing on Brooklyn, and how many papes I was planning to sell and if I’d gotten everything cleared with Spot before entering.”

“That scare the other kids off?” Jack asked. 

“It was like they didn’t see the Brooklyn guy, and the Brooklyn guy didn’t see them. They didn’t exist to each other. The other kids were just following the teacher around like ducklings, and so was I till that happened.”

“How’d you get past?” 

David shrugged, “I talked him into letting me go. It’s not as if I was threatening anything of Spot’s.”

Jack just nodded. He wondered how much David had slept in the last week or so. Probably not much, judging from the way he was rambling on, because as much as Dave lived up to his nickname, he only really talked this much when he was about ready to drop from exhaustion. How Jack had gone from being mad at David to worrying about whether or not he’d gotten enough sleep, Jack didn’t know, especially since he had plenty of his own stuff to worry about. Jack shifted away from David a little to rub his shoulders, hoping he’d relax. Maybe David could stay over. Jack’s apartment was a shithole, but being able to have David stay over sometimes was one of the biggest reasons he bothered to pay rent on it at all. All things considered, tonight seemed like a good night to keep him around. 

“What I was saying, about how I should have passed the test…”

“You really feel like sayin’ it tonight?” Jack asked quietly. He felt David shake his head. A ghost of a smile appeared on Jack’s face, and he gave David a quick kiss on the cheek.  
“I would’ve gone to Boston with you,” Jack said. “I would’ve gone just about anywhere that wasn’t here.” 

David straightened up suddenly at that, and turned to look at Jack, with a new alertness that told Jack that David had understood his meaning, and that made Jack regret saying anything at all. 

“I messed up really badly,” David said. 

“Try talking to me ‘bout stuff next time,” Jack suggested, since he couldn’t deny that David had kind of made a mess of everything. 

“Do you want to talk now?” David asked. 

“Better wait till morning,” Jack suggested. Even he had enough sense of timing to know that this wasn’t the moment to be having this conversation, which is why he shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. He would have left it at that, but David looked so frustrated and worried, that Jack realized he’d have say something. “Look, I ain’t mad at you or nothin’. I’m just ready to get out of New York, and we’ve gotta find a way to make that happen before this city eats me alive. I had a lot of time to think about that while you wasn’t around.”

David didn’t say anything, and that’s how Jack knew he was really upset… upset, overwhelmed, and tired, in a way that was starting to seep into Jack, and make him wish that everything would just stop for a while. 

“Your folks know you’re here?” Jack asked.

A nod. Jack sighed. He tried kissing David a couple of times, around his ear and neck, but he wasn’t feeling it, and he could tell David wasn’t either, so after a minute Jack just rolled over on the bed to lie down, pulling David with him. 

“Let’s get some rest,” Jack suggested. “We’ll talk in a while.”  
No response from David. 

David did eventually fall asleep, the hours of rest he’d missed while he was studying working in his favor for once. Jack, on the other hand, didn’t have anything like that to help him along, and more than enough worries to keep him awake and blinking until morning came and the first pitiful, watery beams of New York sun came filtering in through the grime of his window.


End file.
